1. Introduction

ED: Well, thank you everybody for making it. I'm Ed Falk and
this man needs very little introduction; if you don't know what the
letters RMS stand for, you probably don't belong in this room.

Richard was the founder of the Free Software Foundation, in 1984 I
believe it was, and as such could be considered the father of free
software and, of course, Google's infrastructure is based on free
software. So we owe the free software movement quite a great deal of
thanks. [And my mic is dying on this microphone so I won't talk too
long.] This is Richard Stallman and we thank him for being here on short
notice and we thank our mutual friend Lile Elam who arranged all of this
and I think with no further ado, I give you Richard!

[Richard bows]

2. How it started

So, the topic of my speech is free software. I didn't begin free
software; there was free software going back to the early days of
computing. As soon as there were a couple of computers of the same
model, people could try sharing software. And they did.

{This is not... This has a problem. How do we stop the feedback? Can
someone do anything? I'm willing to get some feedback, but only from
you, not from the PA system.

AUDIENCE: [unintelligible]

RICHARD: Well, that doesn't matter; I'm not an advocate of
open source and never was and never will be.}

So free software existed before I started programming and I had the
good fortune, in the 1970s, of being part of a community of programmers
who shared software. So I learned about free software as a way of life,
by living it. And I came to appreciate what it meant to be free to share
with people, not divided from the rest of the world by attitudes of
secrecy and hostility.

But that community died in the early '80s and I found myself
confronted by the prospect of spending the rest of my life in a world of
proprietary software. And, worst of all, confronted by the prospect of
signing a non-disclosure agreement {which I}. And I had concluded that
it is unethical to sign a non-disclosure agreement for generally useful
technical information, such as software. To promise not to share with
one's fellows is a violation of human solidarity. So when I saw that the
machine downstairs was asking me to sign an NDA, I just said, "I can't
sign an NDA." Well, fortunately, there was an option; they let me come
in here and speak without signing it, otherwise you would have had to go
outside to listen. [Laughter]

(They asked a couple of other interesting questions; they asked about
company, so I said I'm available tonight. [Looking at name
tag][Laughter] And they asked for my host, so I put down
fencepost.gnu.org. But that's just the hacker spirit.)

So I found myself in a situation where the only way you could get a
modern computer and start to use it was to sign a non-disclosure
agreement for some proprietary operating system. Because all the
operating systems for modern computers in 1983 were proprietary, and
there was no lawful way to get a copy of those operating systems without
signing a non-disclosure agreement, which was unethical. So I decided to
try to do something about it, to try to change that situation. And the
only way I could think of to change it was to write another operating
system, and then say as the author "this system is free; you can have it
without a non-disclosure agreement and you're welcome to redistribute it
to other people. You're welcome to study how it works. You're welcome to
change it." So, instead of being divided
and helpless, the users of this system would live in freedom. Ordinary
proprietary software is part of a scheme where users are deliberately
kept divided and helpless. The program comes with a license that says
you're forbidden to share it, and in most cases you can't get the source
code, so you can't study it or change it. It may even have malicious
features and you can't tell. With free software, we respect the user's
freedom, and that's the whole point. The reason for the free software
movement is so that the people of cyberspace can have freedom, so that
there is a way to live in freedom and still use a computer, to avoid
being kept divided and helpless.

3. GNU operating system

You can't use a computer without an operating system, so a free
software operating system was absolutely essential. And in 1983 I
announced my plan to develop one: an operating system called GNU.

I had decided to make the system UNIX-like so that it would be
portable. The operating system that we had used for many years at the
Artificial Intelligence Lab was the Incompatible Timesharing System, or
ITS. It had been written in assembler language for the PDP-10, so when
Digital discontinued the PDP-10, our many years of work turned into dust
and blew away. I didn't want to write another system and have the same
thing happen, so I decided this system had better be portable. But there
was only one successful portable operating system I knew of, and that
was UNIX. So I decided to follow the design of UNIX, figuring that way
I'd have a good chance of succeeding in making a system that was useful
and portable. And then I decided to make the system upward-compatible
with the interfaces of UNIX, and the reason for this was so that users
could switch to it without an incompatible change.

I realized that I could take the best ideas from the various systems
I had helped develop or use and add my pet ideas and make my dream
operating system. But this would have been incompatible, and the users
would mostly have rejected it, saying "it would be too much work to
switch, so we're just not going to." So, by making the system
upward-compatible with UNIX, I could spare the users that obstacle and
make more of a chance that users would actually use the system.

If the users had rejected it, I would have had a perfect excuse. I
could have said "I offered them freedom and they rejected it; it's their
fault." But I wanted to make more than just an excuse. I wanted to
build a community where people would actually live in freedom, which
meant I had to develop a system people would actually use. So I decided
to make the system upward-compatible with UNIX.

Now, UNIX consists of many components that communicate through
interfaces that are more or less documented. And the users use those
interfaces. So to be compatible with UNIX required using the same
interfaces, which meant that the initial design decisions were already
made, except one: what range of target machines to support. UNIX had
been designed to support 16-bit machines, which was a lot of extra work,
because programs had to be kept small; so I decided to save that extra
work by not supporting anything less than a 32-bit machine. I figured it
would take many years to get the system done and by then people would
normally be using 32-bit machines anyway, and that turned out to be
true.

So then the only thing that I needed before I could start work was a
name. Now, to be a hacker means to enjoy playful cleverness -- in
programming, and in other areas of life, any area of life [where] you
could be playfully clever. And there was a hacker tradition that when
you were writing a program that was similar to some existing program,
you could give your new program a name that's a recursive acronym,
saying it is not the other program.

For instance, in the '60s and '70s there were many TECO text editors,
more or less similar; typically each system would have a TECO and it
would be called something-or-other-TECO. But one clever hacker called
his program TINT, for "TINT Is Not TECO" -- the first recursive acronym.
And we thought that was very funny. So after I developed the first
Emacs extensible text editor in 1975, there were many imitations, and
some were called this-or-that-Emacs. But one was called FINE for "FINE
Is Not Emacs" and there was SINE for "SINE Is Not Emacs", and EINE for
"EINE Is Not Emacs", and MINCE for "MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs." Then
EINE was mostly rewritten, and version two was called ZWEI for "ZWEI Was
EINE Initially." [Laughter]

So I looked for a recursive acronym for "Something is not UNIX," but
the usual four-letter method was no good, because none of those was a
word. And if it doesn't have some other meaning, it's not funny. So I
thought, "what else can I do, hmm?" Nothing came to me, so I thought,
"I'll make a contraction, then I could get a three-letter recursive
acronym." I started substituting all 26 letters: ANU, BNU, CNU, DNU,
ENU, FNU, GNU! Well, "gnu" is the funniest word in the English language,
so that had to be the choice. If you can call something "GNU," it makes
no sense to pick anything else.

So, of course, the reason why the word "gnu" is used for so much
word-play is that, according to the dictionary, it's pronounced "new."
So people started asking each other, "hey, what's g-nu," as a joke, long
before you could answer "GNU's Not UNIX." But now you can give that
answer and the best part is, it sounds like you're obnoxiously telling
the person what it isn't, instead of answering his question. But the
fact is, you're giving the exact meaning of GNU; so you are, in fact,
answering the question in the most exact possible way, but it gives the
appearance that you're refusing to.

In any case, when it's the name of our operating system, please
pronounce a hard G; don't follow the dictionary. If you talk about the
"new" operating system, you'll get people very confused. We've been
working on it for 20 years now, so it's not new anymore. But it still
is, and always will be, GNU, no matter how many people call it Linux by
mistake.

{[AUDIENCE: unintelligible]
[RICHARD: Thank you!]}

So, having the name I could start work. I quit my job at MIT to begin
writing pieces of the GNU operating system, in January 1984. I had to
quit my job because, had I remained an MIT employee, that would have
enabled MIT to claim to own all the code I was writing, and MIT could
have turned it into proprietary software products. And since MIT had
already done that kind of thing, I certainly couldn't trust them not to
do so here. And I didn't want to have to argue with the MIT
administration about all the details of the license I was going to use.
So, by quitting my job, I took them out of the equation, and I have
never had a job since then. However, the head of the AI Lab was nice
enough to let me keep using the facilities, so I began using a UNIX
machine at the AI Lab to start bootstrapping pieces of the GNU
system.

I had never used UNIX before that time. I was never a UNIX wizard and
I chose to follow the design of UNIX for the exact reason that I've told
you, not because UNIX was my favorite system or anything. Sometimes
people write that it was changes in UNIX's licensing policy that
inspired GNU. Well, this is not true; in fact, UNIX was never free
software. They were more or less restrictive and more or less nasty
about enforcing the requirements, but it was never free software, so
those changes actually made no difference and, in any case, they took
place long before I ever saw an actual UNIX machine.

4. GNU Emacs

So, at the time, I thought that I and the other people I was
recruiting to try to help would develop all these pieces and make a
complete system and then we'd say, "come and get it." But that's not how
it happened. In September '84, I started developing GNU Emacs, which was
my second implementation of the extensible programmable text editor. And
by early '85, it was suitable for me to do all my editing with it. Now,
that was a big relief. You see, I had absolutely no intention of
learning to use Vi. [Laughter, applause] So, until that point, I did my
editing on other machines where there was an Emacs and copied the files
through the net, in order to test them on the UNIX machine. Once GNU
Emacs was running, I could do my editing on the UNIX machine.

But other people wanted to get copies of GNU Emacs to use it for
their editing, to use it on their UNIX systems. There was no GNU system
yet, there were just a few pieces. But this one piece turned out to be
interesting by itself. People asked me for copies, so I had to work out
the details of how to distribute it. Of course, I put a copy in the
anonymous FTP server, and that was good for people on the net, but in
1985, most programmers were not on the Internet. So they asked me for
copies; what was I going to say? I could have said, "I want to spend my
time writing more pieces of the GNU system, not writing mag tapes, so
please find a friend who can download it and put it on tape for you,"
and they would have found people sooner or later, because programmers
generally know other programmers.

5. Expensive habits

But I had no job, and I was looking for some way to make some money
through my work on free software. So I announced, "send me $150 and I'll
mail you a tape of GNU Emacs." And the orders began dribbling in. By the
middle of the year, they were trickling in, eight to ten orders a month,
which, if necessary, I could have lived on.

That's because I make efforts to resist expensive habits. An
expensive habit is like a trap; it's dangerous. Now most Americans have
the exact opposite attitude: if they make this much money, they look for
how to spend this much, [makes ample gesture] which is completely
imprudent. So they start buying houses and cars and boats and planes and
rare stamps and artwork and adventure travel and children, [laughter]
all sorts of expensive luxuries that use up a lot of the world's
resources, especially the children. And
then, the next thing they know, they've got to desperately struggle all
day long to get money to pay for these things, so they have no time even
to enjoy them, which is especially sad when it's a matter of children.
The other things, I guess, can get repossessed. So then they become
puppets of money, unable to decide what they're going to do with their
lives. If you don't want to be a puppet of money, then resist the
expensive habits, so that the less you need to spend to live on, the
more flexibility you've got and the less of your life you're forced to
spend to make that money.

So I still live, basically, like a student, and I want it to be that
way.

6. Definition of free software

But people sometimes used to say to me, "what do you mean, it's free
software, if it costs $150?" Well, the English word "free" has multiple
meanings and they were confused by that. It even took me a few years to
realize that I needed to clarify this. One meaning, you see, refers to
price, and another meaning refers to freedom. When we speak of free
software, we're talking about freedom, not price. So think of "free
speech," not "free beer."

Some users got their copies of GNU Emacs from me through the net, and
did not pay. Some users got their copies from me on a tape, and did pay.
And some got their copies from someone else, not from me, because
everyone who had a copy was free to redistribute it. And did they pay
that somebody else? Well, I don't know; that was between them. They
didn't have to tell me. So GNU Emacs was gratis for some users and paid
for for other users, but it was free software for all of them, because
all of them had certain essential freedoms, which are the definition of
free software.

So let me now give you the definition of free software. You see, it's
very easy to say "I'm in favor of freedom." I mean, even Bush can say
that. [Laughter] I don't think he knows what it means. But the point is,
unless you make a person get more specific, it's just cheap talk. So let
me give you -- let me get more specific now, and give you the definition
of free software.

A program is free software for you, a particular user, if you have
the following four freedoms:

Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program however you like;
Freedom 1 is the freedom to help yourself by studying the source code to
see what the program really does and then changing it to do what you
want;
Freedom 2 is the freedom to help your neighbor by distributing copies to
others; and
Freedom 3 is the freedom to help build your community, that is the
freedom to publish a modified version so others can benefit from your
changes;

All four of these freedoms are essential. They are not levels of
freedom, they are four freedoms, all of which you must have in order for
the program to qualify as free software. All of these are freedoms that
no computer user should ever be denied.

7. Freedom 2 moral dilemma

Why these particular freedoms? Why should we define it this way?

Freedom 2 is necessary so that you can live an upright life, so that
you can be ethical, be a good member of society. If you use a program
that does not give you Freedom 2, the freedom to help your neighbor, the
freedom to distribute copies to others, then you are facing a potential
moral dilemma that could happen at any moment, when somebody comes up
and says, "could I have a copy of that program?" At that point, what are
you going to do? You're forced to choose between two evils. One evil is
to make a copy of the program for that person and violate the license.
The other evil is to comply with the license, but be a bad neighbor. So
you've got to choose the lesser evil, which is to make a copy for that
person and violate the license. [Laughter, applause]

You see, in this case, this evil is lesser because it's directed at
somebody who intentionally tried to divide you from the rest of society,
and thus did something extremely wrong to you; and therefore deserves
it. However, it's not good to live your life by lying to people. When
somebody {asks you to promise that} says, "I'll let you have a copy of
this, but you'll have to promise not to share it with anyone," the right
thing to do is say no. Once you have thought about this moral dilemma,
you should anticipate that when you start using that program it's going
to lead you to choose between two evils, and therefore you should refuse
to use that program. You should just say "no, thanks" to it, and that's
the principle that I believe in. If someone offers me a program that I'm
not free to share with you, I'm going to say no, on principle.

In fact, I was once in the audience when John Perry Barlow was giving
a speech and he said, "raise your hands if you have no unauthorized
copies of software." And he was surprised to see someone raise his hand,
until he saw it was me. And then he said, "oh, of course, you," because
he knew why I have no unauthorized copies; that's because all my copies
of software are free software, and everybody's authorized to make
copies. That's the whole point.

8. Freedom 2 spirit of good
will

The most essential resource of any society is the spirit of good
will, the willingness to help your neighbor; not necessarily every time
you're asked, but fairly often. This is what makes the difference
between a livable society and a dog-eat-dog jungle. This spirit is not
going to be 100% and it's not going to be zero, but it's going to be
somewhere in between -- and cultural actions can influence it, can raise
it or lower it. And it's essential to work to raise it some, because
that makes life easier for everyone. So it's no accident that the
world's major religions have been encouraging this spirit of good will
for thousands of years.

So what does it mean when powerful social institutions say that it's
wrong to share? They're poisoning this vital resource, something no
society can afford. Now what does it mean when they say that if you
share with your neighbor, you're a pirate? They're saying that helping
your neighbor is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship. Well, nothing
could be more wrong than that. Attacking ships is very, very bad;
helping your neighbor is good.

And what does it mean when they establish harsh punishments for
anyone caught sharing? How much fear do you think it's going to take
before everyone's too scared to help his neighbor? And do you want that
terror campaign to go on in our society? I hope that the answer is no.
We need to abolish the war on copying that is being imposed on our
society. We need to say, loud and clear, "copying and sharing with your
neighbor is good, it's legitimate, and laws that prohibit this are
wrong."

9. Freedom 0
to run a program, Freedom 1 to modify it

So that's the reason for Freedom 2; it's essentially an ethical
reason. You can't live an ethical life if you don't have Freedom 2.

Freedom 0 is needed for a completely different reason: so you can
control your own computer. If you are restricted in when or how much or
how you can run the program, clearly you're not using your computer in
freedom. So Freedom 0 is obvious, but freedom 0 is not enough, because
with Freedom 0 all you can do is use the program the way it was
programmed by its developer. You're free to do this [makes hand sign] or
nothing. To really be free, you've got to be in control of what the
program does, so you need Freedom 1, which is the freedom to help
yourself, the freedom to study the source code and then change it to do
what you want.

If you don't have Freedom 1, you don't know what the program's doing.
The developer is saying, "just trust me" and blind faith is the only way
you can do it. And you have to be really blind, given that it's not
unusual for proprietary programs to have malicious features, features
that are put in not to serve the user, but rather to impose on, harm or
restrict the user. For instance, spyware is quite common.

[51 seconds of missing audio were filled in by RMS in Aug 2010]

Microsoft Windows spies on the user; specific spy features have been
found. Windows Media Player spies too; it reports to Microsoft
whatever the user looks at.

[End replacement for 51 seconds of missing audio]

course do it. RealPlayer, for instance, spies on you. The TiVo spies
on you. Some people were excited about the TiVo, enthusiastic about it,
because it uses some free software inside. But it also has non-free
software in it and it spies on you. So this shows it's not enough. We
shouldn't cheer when something uses some free software; we should cheer
when it respects the user's freedom.

10. DRM, back doors, bugs

But spyware is not as bad as it gets. There are non-free software
packages that are deliberately designed to refuse to work. This is
called DRM, Digital Restrictions Management, where the program says, "I
won't let you look at that file; I won't let you copy this; I won't let
you edit this." Well, who the hell is this program to stop you? And
sometimes non-free programs will reconfigure your machine, for instance
make it display advertisements, figuring that you won't know it's going
to happen and you won't know how to undo it afterward.

And sometimes they have actual back doors. For instance, Windows XP
has a back door: when it asks for an upgrade, it tells Microsoft who you
are, so Microsoft can give you an upgrade designed just for you. And
this upgrade could have secret accounts, it could have special spy
features, it could just refuse to work. And there's essentially nothing
you can do. So that's the back door that Microsoft knows about and we
know about.

[Added in 2010: We later learned that Microsoft can force "upgrades"
-- a much nastier back door.]

There might be other back doors that we don't know about and maybe
even Microsoft doesn't know about. When I was in India in January, I was
told some programmers in India had been arrested and accused of working
for Al-Qaeda, trying to introduce back doors into Windows XP. So,
apparently, that effort failed. But did some others succeed? There's no
way we can tell.

Now, I won't claim that all developers of non-free software put in
malicious features. There are some who try to put in features so that
they will be convenient for the user and only for that. But they are
humans, so they make mistakes. They can design features with all the
best will that you don't like, or they can write bugs in their code. And
when that happens, you're helpless too; you're the helpless prisoner of
any decision that they make. Whether it's malicious or made with good
will, if you don't like it, you're stuck.

Now, we, the developers of free software, are also human, we also
make mistakes. I have designed features that users didn't like. I have
written code that had bugs in it. The difference is, {with our} you're
not a prisoner of our decisions, because we don't keep you helpless. If
you don't like my decisions, you can change them, because you have the
freedom to change them. I won't blame the developers of non-free,
user-subjugating software for being human and making mistakes; I will
blame them for keeping you helpless prisoner of their mistakes by
denying you the freedom to correct those mistakes yourself.

11. Freedom 3 having no
master

But Freedom 1 is not enough. Freedom 1 is the freedom personally to
study and change the source code. Freedom 1 is not enough because there
are millions of users who use computers, but don't know how to program,
so they can't take advantage of Freedom 1, not personally. And Freedom 1
is not enough even for us programmers, because there's just so much
software, even so much free software, that nobody has the time to study
it all and master it all and make all the changes that she wants.

So the only way we can really, fully have control over our own
software is if we do so together. And that's what Freedom 3 is for.
Freedom 3 is the freedom to publish a modified version, so others can
use it too. And this is what enables us to work together, taking control
of our software. Because I could make this change in a program and
publish the modified version, and then you could make that change and
publish the modified version, and someone else can make that change and
publish the modified version. And now we've got a version with all three
changes in it and everybody can switch to that if everybody likes
it.

With this freedom, any collectivity of users can take control
together and make the software do what they together want. Suppose there
are 1,000,000 users who would like a certain change. Well, by luck, some
of them will be programmers; let's say there are 10,000 of them who know
how to program. Well, sooner or later, a few of them will make the
change and publish the modified version and then all of those million
users can switch to it. You know, most of them don't know how to
program, but they can still switch to it. So they all get what they
want.

Now let's suppose there are only 1,000 people who want some other
change and none of them knows how to program. They can still make use of
these freedoms. They can form an organization and each put in money, so
if each puts in $100, that makes $100,000. And at that point they can go
to a programming company and say, "will you make this change for
$100,000 and when can you have it done?" And if they don't like the
answer from there, they can go to another programming company and say,
"will you make this change and when can you have it done?" Which shows
us, first of all, that these 1,000 users who don't know how to program
can, by using the four freedoms, get the change that they want. And
second, it shows that free software means a free market for support.

Proprietary software typically means a monopoly for support. Only the
developer has the source code in most cases, so only the developer can
offer any support. If you want a change, you've got to go to the
developer and beg. Now, if you're very big and important, maybe the
developer will pay attention. If you're not, the developer will say, "go
away, don't bother me." Or maybe the developer will say, "pay us and
we'll let you report a bug." And if you do that, the developer will say,
"thank you. In six months there will be an upgrade. Buy the upgrade and
you'll see if this bug was fixed and you will see what new bugs we have
for you."

But with free software, you're dealing with a free market, so that
those who really value support can, in general, get better support for
their money by using free software. Now, one paradoxical consequence of
this is, when you have a choice between several non-free programs to do
a job, this is actually a choice between monopolies. If you pick this
program, the support for it afterwards will be a monopoly. If you pick
this program, [points hand in different direction] the support for it
will be a different monopoly, and if you pick this program, [points hand
in different direction] the support for it will be yet another monopoly.
So you're choosing one of these three monopolies.

Now, what this shows is that merely having a choice between a
discrete set of options is not freedom. Freedom is something much deeper
and much broader than having a few choices you can make. Many people try
to equate freedom with having some choice and they're missing the point
completely. Freedom means that you get to make the decisions about how
to live your life. {It doesn't mean, you know} Having three choices
about being able to choose this master or this master or this master is
just a choice of masters, and a choice of masters is not freedom.
Freedom is having no master.

12. Copyleft forbidding is
forbidden

So I've explained the reasons for the four freedoms. And thus I've
explained to you what free software means. A program is free software
for you, a particular user, if you have all of these four freedoms. Why
do I define it that way? The reason is that sometimes the same code can
be free software for some users and non-free for the rest. This might
seem strange, so let me give you an example to show how it happens.

The biggest example I know of is the X Window System. It was
developed at MIT in the late '80s and released under a license that gave
the user all four freedoms, so if you got X in source code under that
license, it was free software for you. Among those who got it were
various computer manufacturers that distributed UNIX systems. They got
the source code for X, they changed it as necessary to run on their
platform, they compiled it and they put the binaries into their UNIX
system, and they distributed only the binaries to all of their customers
under the same license as the rest of UNIX -- the same non-disclosure
agreement. So, for those many users,
the X Window System was no more free than the rest of UNIX. In this
paradoxical situation, the answer to the question "is X free software or
not?" depended on where you made the measurement. If you made the
measurement coming out of the developer's group, you'd say, "I observe
all four freedoms; it's free software." If you made the measurement
among the users, you'd say, "most of them don't have these freedoms;
it's not free software."

The developers of X did not consider this a problem, because their
goal was not to give users freedom, it was to have a big success, and as
far as they were concerned, those many users who were using the X Window
System without freedom were just a part of their big success. But, in
the GNU Project, our goal specifically was to give the users freedom. If
what happened to X had happened to GNU, GNU would be a failure.

So I looked for a way to stop this from happening. And the method I
came up with is called copyleft. Copyleft is based legally on copyright
law, and you can think of it as taking copyright and flipping it over to
get copyleft.

Here's how it works: we start with a copyright notice which legally
doesn't actually make a difference anymore, but it reminds people that
the program is copyrighted, which means that, by default, it's
prohibited to copy, distribute or modify this program.
But then we say, "you are authorized to
make copies, you are authorized to distribute them, you are authorized
to modify this program and you are authorized to publish modified or
extended versions." But there is a condition, and the condition says
that any program you distribute that contains any substantial part of
this must, as a whole, be distributed under these conditions, no more
and no less. Which means that, no matter how many people modify the
program or how much, as long as any substantial amount of our code is in
there, that program must be free software in the same way. In effect, we
guarantee that nobody can put himself between you and me and strip off
the freedom and pass the code on to you missing the freedom. In other
words, forbidding is forbidden.

13. GNU General Public License

Copyleft makes the four freedoms into inalienable rights for all
users, so that wherever the code goes, the freedom goes with it. The
specific license that we use to implement the general concept of
copyleft is called the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL for short.
This license is used for around two thirds or three quarters of all free
software packages. But that still leaves a substantial number that have
other licenses. Some of those licenses are copyleft licenses, some are
not. So we have copylefted free software and we have non-copylefted free
software. In both cases, the developers
have respected your freedom; they have not tried to trample your
freedom. The difference is, with copyleft we go further and we actively
defend your freedom against anyone who would try to be a middleman and
take it away from you, whereas the developers of non-copylefted free
software don't do that. They have not tried to take away your freedom,
but they don't actively protect your freedom from anyone else. So I
think that they could do more for the sake of freedom. But they haven't
done anything bad; insofar as they have done things, those things are
good. So I won't say that they are wrong, I will just say that they
could do more. I think that they're making a mistake.

But their work is free software, so it does contribute to our
community and, in fact, that software can be part of a free operating
system such as GNU.

13a. Developing GNU

During the 1980s, our work on the GNU Project was to develop or find
all these pieces of GNU so that we could have a complete GNU system. In
some cases, someone else wrote a program and made it free software and
we were able to use it, and that was good because it shortened the work
that we had to do. For instance, the X Window System is one of the
programs that was developed by others for reasons of their own, but they
did make it free software, so we could use it.

Now, people were saying the job was so big, we'd never finish it.
Well, I thought we would eventually get a free operating system but I
agreed the job was big; we had to look for shortcuts. So, for instance,
I always wanted to have windowing facilities in GNU. I had written a
couple of window systems at the AI LAB before even starting GNU, so of
course I wanted that in the system. But we never developed a GNU window
system because someone else developed X first. I looked at it and I
said, "well, it's not copylefted, but it is free, it's popular, it's
powerful, so let's just use it." And so we saved one big chunk of work.
So we took it, X, and we put it into the GNU system and we started
making other pieces of GNU work with X. Because the goal was to have a
free operating system, not to have a free operating system every piece
of which had been written purposely by us just for that.

14. Making money off free
software

However, it only happened occasionally that someone else released
some free software that was useful in GNU and when it happened, it was a
coincidence, because they were not writing this software in order to
have a free operating system. So when it happened, that was great, but
there were lots of other pieces we had to develop. Some were developed
by staff of the Free Software Foundation. The Free Software Foundation
is a tax-exempt charity to promote free software which we founded in
October, '85, after GNU Emacs' popularity suggested that people might
actually start donating money to the GNU project.
So we founded the Free Software
Foundation and it asked for donations, but also took over selling the
tapes of GNU Emacs. And it turns out that most of the FSF's income for
the first many years came from that, from selling things, from selling
copies of software and manuals that everyone was free to copy. Now this
is interesting, because this was supposedly impossible; but we did it
anyway.

Now that meant I had to find some other way to make a living. As the
president of the FSF, I did not want to compete with it; I thought that
would be unfair and not correct behavior. So I started making my living
by commissions to change the software I had written and teaching classes
about it. So people would want some change to be made in Emacs or GCC,
and they would think of hiring me, because they figured I was the author
so I could do a better job faster. So I started charging as much as $250
an hour and I calculated I could make a living in 7 weeks of paid work
per year -- and that meant enough money to spend, an equal amount to
save, and an equal amount for taxes. And [when I reached] that point I
figured, "I won't take any more paid work this year, I've got other,
better things to do."

So I've actually had three different free software businesses during
the period I've been working on GNU. I've described two of them; the
third one is, I get paid for some of my speeches. Whether I get paid for
this speech, I don't yet know. [Laughter] I said, "please pay me what
you can." Now, I think Google ought to be able to afford to pay me some
handsome amount, but whether it will, I don't know. Anyway, I figured
it's worth doing the speech just for the good it will do for the
movement.

15. Why write free software

So this raises the question of why people develop free software. You
see, there are people who believe that no one would ever write software
except to get paid, that that's the only motive that anyone would ever
have to write code. It's amazing, the kind of utterly stupid, simplistic
theories that people will sometimes believe because that's part of a
prevailing ideology.

Now, human nature is very complex. Whatever it is people are doing,
they might do for various reasons. In fact, one person will often have
multiple motives simultaneously for a single act. Nonetheless, there are
people who say, "if the software is free, that means nobody's paid to
write it, so no one will write it." Now, obviously they were confusing
the two meanings of the word "free," so their theory was based on a
confusion. In any case, we can compare their theory with empirical fact
and we can see that at least hundreds, maybe thousands of people are
paid to work on free software, including some people here, I believe,
and there are about a million or so people developing free software at
all for the many different reasons they have. {So to say that nobody}
This simplistic theory about motivation is absurd.

So let's see what motivates people to write free software; what are
the real motives? Well, I don't necessarily know about them. There could
always be a person who has a motive that I don't know about or I've
forgotten about. I can only tell you the motives that I recall
encountering.

One motive is political idealism: making the world a better place
where we can live together in freedom. Now, that's a very important
motive for me, but it's not my only motive. And there are others who
write free software and don't agree with that motive at all.

Another motive that's very important is fun. Programming is
tremendous fun. Not for everybody, of course, but for a lot of the best
programmers. And these are the people whose contributions we want most.
In fact, it's so much fun, it's especially fun, when no one can tell you
what to do, which is why so many people who have jobs programming like
to write free software in their spare time.

But this is not the only motive; another motive is to be appreciated.
If 1% of our community is using your program, that's hundreds of
thousands of users. That's a lot of people admiring you.

Another related, but different, motive is professional reputation. If
1% of our community is using your program, you can put that on your
resume and it proves you're a good programmer. You don't even have to go
to school.

Another motivation is gratitude. If you've been using the community's
free software for years and appreciating it, then when you write a
program, that's your opportunity to pay something back to the community
that has given you so much.

Another motivation is hatred for Microsoft. [Laughter] Now, this is a
rather foolish motive, because Microsoft is really just one of many
developers of non-free software and they're all doing the same evil
thing. It's a mistake to focus [solely] on Microsoft, and this mistake
can have bad consequences. When people focus too much on Microsoft, they
start forgetting that all the others are doing something just as bad.
And they may end up thinking that anything that competes with Microsoft
is good, even if it is also non-free software and thus inherently just
as evil. Now, it's true that these
other companies have not subjugated as many users as Microsoft has, but
that's not for want of trying; they just haven't succeeded in
mistreating as many people as Microsoft has, which is hardly, ethically
speaking, an excuse. Nonetheless, {when this particular motive
motivates} this motive does motivate people to develop free software, so
we have to count it as one of the motives that has this result.

And another motive is money. When people were being paid to develop
free software, that's part of their motive for the work that they're
doing. In fact, when I was paid to make improvements in various programs
I had written, that money was part of my motive for doing those
particular jobs, too.

[RMS, 2010: A motive I forgot to mention is improving a free program
because you want to use the improvement yourself.]

So there are many possible motives to write free software. And,
fortunately, there are many developers of free software and a lot of
free software is being developed.

16. The Kernel, Linux

So, during the 1980s we were filling in these missing pieces of the
GNU operating system. By the early '90s we had almost everything
necessary. Only one important piece was missing, one essential piece for
an initial system, and that was the kernel. We started developing a
kernel in 1990. {I was looking for some way to} I was looking for some
shortcut, some way we could start from something existing. I thought
that debugging a kernel would be painful, because you don't get to do it
with your symbolic debugger, and when it crashes, it's sort of
annoying.

So I was looking for a way to bypass that work, and I found one
eventually, a microkernel called Mach that had been developed as a
funded project at Carnegie Mellon. Now, Mach doesn't have all the
features of UNIX; the idea is, it provides certain general low-level
features and you implement the rest in user programs. Well, that, I
thought, would be easy to debug, because they're user programs; when
they crash, the system isn't dead. So people began working on those user
programs, which we called the GNU Hurd, because it's a herd of GNU
servers (you see, gnus live in herds).

Anyway, I thought that this design would enable us to get the job
done faster, but it didn't work out that way; it actually took many
years to get the Hurd to run, partly because Mach was unreliable, partly
because the debugging environment wasn't very good, partly because it's
hard to debug these multithreaded, asynchronous programs and partly
because this was somewhat of a research project. At least that's as far
as I can tell; I was never involved in the actual development of the
Hurd.

Fortunately, we didn't have to wait for that, because in 1991, Linus
Torvalds, a Finnish college student, developed his own kernel, using the
traditional monolithic design, and he got it to barely run in less than
a year. Initially, Linux --that's what this kernel's name was-- was not
free, but in 1992 he re-released it under the GNU General Public License
and at that point it was free software. And so it was possible, by
combining Linux and the GNU system, to make a complete free operating
system. And thus, the goal we had set out for, that I had announced in
1983, had been reached: there was, for the first time, a complete modern
operating system for modern computers, and it was possible to get a
modern computer and run it without betraying the rest of humanity,
without being subjugated. You could do this by installing the GNU +
Linux operating system.

17. GNU vs. Linux
confusion problem freedom

But the people who combined GNU and Linux got confused and they
started naming the entire thing Linux, which was actually the name of
one piece. And somehow that confusion spread faster than we have been
able to correct it. So I'm sure you've heard many people speaking of
Linux as an operating system, an operating system {most of which} which
basically started in 1984 under the name of the GNU Project.

Now, this clearly isn't right. This system isn't Linux; it contains
Linux, Linux is the kernel, but the system as a whole is basically GNU.
So I ask you: please don't call it Linux. If you call it Linux, you're
giving Linus Torvalds credit for our work. Now, he contributed one
important piece of the system, but he didn't contribute the biggest part
and the overall vision was there long before he got involved. We started
developing the system when he was in junior high school. So please give
us equal mention; surely we deserve at least that. You can do that by
calling the system GNU/Linux, or GNU+Linux, or GNU&Linux, whichever
punctuation mark you feel expresses it best.

Now, of course, part of the reason why I'm asking for this is that we
deserve credit, but that's not really a very important thing. If it were
just a matter of credit, it wouldn't be worth making a fuss about. But
there more at stake here. You see, when people think that the system is
Linux, they then assume incorrectly that it was mainly developed and
started by Linus Torvalds and then they assume incorrectly that the
overall vision came from him, so they look at his vision and follow
that. Now, his vision is apolitical. He's not motivated to fight for
freedom. He doesn't believe that computer users deserve the freedom to
share and change software. He has never supported our philosophy. Well,
he has a right to his views and the fact that he disagrees with us
doesn't reduce the value of his contribution.

The reason we have the GNU+Linux system is because of a many-year
campaign for freedom. We in the GNU Project didn't develop Linux, just
as we didn't develop X, or TeX, or various other free programs that are
now important parts of the system. But people who didn't share our
values, who weren't motivated by the determination to live in freedom,
would have seen no reason to aim for a complete system, and they would
never have done so, and never have produced such a thing, if not for
us.

But this tends to be forgotten nowadays. You will see, if you look
around, most of the discussion of the GNU system calls it Linux, and
tends to refer to it as "open source" rather than as "free software",
and doesn't mention freedom as an issue. This issue, which is the reason
for the system's existence, is mostly forgotten. You see many techies
who prefer to think of technical questions in a narrowly technical
context, without looking beyond at social effects of their technical
decisions. Whether the software tramples your freedom or respects your
freedom, that's part of the social context. That's exactly what techies
tend to forget or devalue. We have to
work constantly to remind people to pay attention to freedom and,
unfortunately, while we keep doing this, the users of our system often
don't pay attention because they don't know it's our system. They don't
know it's the GNU system, they think it's Linux. And that's why it makes
a real difference if you remind people where the system came from.

People will say to me that it doesn't look good to ask for credit.
Well, I'm not asking for credit for me personally; I'm asking for credit
for the GNU Project, which includes thousands of developers. But they
are right, it's true: people who are looking for some reason to see evil
can see evil in that. So they go on and say, "you should let it drop,
and when people call the system Linux, you can smile to yourself and
take pride in a job well done." That would be very wise advice if the
assumption were correct: the assumption that the job is done.

We've made a great beginning, but that's all. We haven't finished the
job. We will have finished the job when every computer is running a free
operating system and free application programs exclusively. The job is
to liberate the inhabitants of cyberspace. We've made a great beginning;
we've developed free operating systems and free GUI desktops and free
office suites and there are now tens of millions of users of these. But
there are hundreds of millions of users of proprietary systems, so we
have a long way to go. And, despite this wide range of free software,
there are still a lot of application things that there is no free
software to do; so we have a lot more work ahead of us.

We've come in view of finishing the job, you know. Maybe we're only
one order of magnitude away, having come through many orders of
magnitude. But that doesn't mean that what's left is easy. And today we
have something that we didn't have before: we have enemies; powerful,
rich enemies, powerful enough to buy governments.

18. Enemies of free software

At the beginning, GNU and the free software movement had no enemies.
There were people who weren't interested, lots of them, but nobody was
actively trying to stop us from developing and releasing a free
operating system. Nowadays, they are trying to stop us and the main
obstacle we face is this, rather than the work itself.

In the US, there are two different laws that prohibit various kinds
of free software.

One of them is the DMCA, which has been used to prohibit the free
software to play a DVD. If you buy a DVD, it's lawful for you to view it
in your computer, but the free software that would enable you to do this
on your GNU/Linux system has been censored in the US. Now, this affects
a fairly narrow range of software: software to view encrypted media. But
many users may want to do that, and if they can't do that with free
software, they may take that as a reason to use non-free software, if
they don't value their freedom.

But the big danger comes from patent law, because the US allows
software ideas to be patented. Now, writing a non-trivial program means
combining hundreds of different ideas. It's very hard to do that if any
one of those ideas might be someone's monopoly. It makes software
development like crossing a mine field, because at each design decision,
probably nothing happens to you, but there's a certain chance that you
will step on a patent and it will blow up your project. And, considering
how many steps you have to take, that adds up into a serious problem. We
have a long list of features that free software packages don't have,
because we're scared to implement them.

And now, the FCC is considering applying the broadcast flag
regulation to software. The FCC adopted a regulation {prohibiting
digital TV tuners unless} requiring digital TV tuners to have a
mechanism to block copying and this has to be tamper-resistant, meaning
it can't be implemented in free software. They haven't finished deciding
whether this applies to software or not, but if they do, they will have
prohibited GNU Radio, which is free software that can decode digital TV
broadcasts.

Then, there's the threat from hardware that has secret specifications
or is designed to interfere with the user's control. Nowadays there are
many pieces of hardware you can get for your PC whose specifications are
secret. They'll sell you the hardware, but they won't tell you how to
run it. So how do we write free software to run it? Well, we either have
to figure out the specs by reverse engineering or we have to put market
pressure on those companies. And in both cases, we are weakened by the
fact that so many of the users of GNU/Linux don't know why this system
was developed and have never heard of these ideas that I'm telling you
today. And the reason is that, when they hear about the system, they
hear it called Linux and it's associated with the apolitical philosophy
of Linus Torvalds. Linus Torvalds is
still working on developing Linux. {which is, you know} Developing the
kernel was an important contribution to our community. At the same time,
he is setting a very public bad example by using a non-free program to
do the job. Now, if he were using a non-free program privately, I would
never even have heard about it and I wouldn't make a fuss about it. But
by inviting the other people who work on Linux to use it with him, he's
setting a very public example legitimizing the use of non-free software.
So when people see that, you know, if they think that's okay, they can't
possibly believe that non-free software is bad. So then, when these
companies say, "yes, {we support} our hardware supports Linux, here is
this binary-only driver you can install, and then it will work," these
people see nothing wrong in that, so they don't apply their market
pressure and they don't feel motivated to help in reverse
engineering.

So when we face the various dangers that we must confront, we are
weakened by the lack of resolve. Now, having strong motivation to fight
for freedom won't guarantee that we win all of these fights, but it will
sure help. It will make us try harder, and if we try harder, we'll win
more of them.

19. Treacherous computing

We are going to have to politically organize to keep from being
completely prohibited from writing free software.

Today, one of the most insidious threats to the future of free
software comes from treacherous computing, which is a conspiracy of many
large corporations. They call it "trusted computing," but what do they
mean by that? What they mean is that an application developer can trust
your computer to obey him and disobey you. So, from your point of view,
it's _treacherous computing_, because your computer won't obey you
anymore. The purpose of this plan is that you won't control your
computer.

And there are various different things that treacherous computing can
be used to do, things like prohibit you from running any program that
hasn't been authorized by the operating system developer. That's one
thing they could do. But they may not feel they dare go that far. But
another thing that they plan to do is to have data that's only available
to a particular application. The idea is that an application will be
able to write data in an encrypted form, such that it can only be
decrypted by the same application, such that nobody else can
independently write another program to access that data. And, of course,
they would use that for limiting access to published works, you know,
something to be a replacement for DVDs so that it would be not only
illegal, but impossible to write the free software to play it.

But they don't have to stop at doing this to published data. They
could do it to your data too. Imagine if treacherous computing is common
in 10 years and Microsoft decides to come out with a new version of Word
format that uses treacherous computing to encrypt your data. Then it
would be impossible to write free software to read word files. Microsoft
is trying every possible method to prevent us from having free software
to read Word files. First, they switched to a secret Word format, so
people had to try to figure out the format. Well, we more or less have
figured it out. There are free programs that will read most Word files
(not all). But then they came up with
another idea. They said, "let's use XML." Now here's what Microsoft
means when they speak of using XML. The beginning of the file has a
trivial thing that says "this is XML and here comes binary Word format
data," and then there's the binary Word format data and then there's
something at the end that says, "that was binary Word format data." And
they patented this. {so that... I'm not sure} I don't know exactly what
the patent does and doesn't cover, but, you know, there are things we
could do, either reading or writing that file format, probably they
could try suing us about. And I'm sure that, if treacherous computing is
available for them to use, they'll use that too.

This is why we have a campaign to refuse to read Word files. Now
there are many reasons you should refuse to read Word files. One is,
they could have viruses in them. If someone sends you a Word file, you
shouldn't look at it. But the point is, you shouldn't even try to look
at it. Nowadays there are free programs that will read most Word files.
But it's really better, better than trying to read the file is if you
send a message back saying, "please send that to me in a format that
isn't secret. It's not a good idea to send people Word files." And the
reason is, we have to overcome the tendency in society for people to use
these secret formats for communication.
We have to convince people to insist on
publicly documented standard formats that everyone is free to implement.
And Word format is the worst offender and so that's the best place to
start. If somebody sends you a Word file, don't try to read it. Write
back, saying "you really shouldn't do that." And there's a page in
www.gnu.org/philosophy which is good to reference. It gives an
explanation of why this is an important issue.

20. Help GNU

Now, www.gnu.org is the website of the GNU Project. So you can go
there for more information. In the /gnu directory you'll find the
history and in the /philosophy directory you'll find articles about the
philosophy of free software and in the /directory you'll find the Free
Software Directory, which now lists over 3,000 usable free software
packages that will run the on GNU/Linux system.

[It is now over 6000, and located in directory.fsf.org]

Now, I'm about to close my speech, but before I do, I'd like to
mention that I've got some stickers here to give away. These stickers
show a flying gnu and a flying penguin, both rather unrealistic, but
they're superheroes. And {I also have some things} if people don't mind,
I've got some things I'm selling on behalf of the Free Software
Foundation, so if you buy them, you're supporting us. I've got these
buttons that say, "ask me about free software -- it's all about freedom"
and I've got some GNU keyrings and GNU pins that are sort of pretty. So
you can buy those. You can also support us by becoming an associate
member. Now, you can do that just through our website, but I also have
some cards you can have if you would like to join [right now].

21. Saint Ignucius

So now I will close my speech by presenting my alter ego. See, people
sometimes accuse me of having a "holier than thou" attitude. Now, I hope
that's not true. I'm not going to condemn somebody just for not being as
firmly committed as I am. I will try to encourage him to become more so,
but that's different. So I don't think I really have a "holier than
thou" attitude, but I have a holy attitude because I'm a saint; it's my
job to be holy.

[Dons a black robe and a magnetic disk halo]
[Laughter, applause]
[Richard holds a laptop like a holy book and waves]

I am Saint Ignucius of the Church of Emacs. I bless your computer, my
child.

Emacs started out as a text editor which became a way of life for
many computer users and then a religion. Does anyone know what the
alt.religion.emacs newsgroup was used for? I know it existed, but since
I'd never read net news, I don't know what was said in it.

In any case, now we even have a great schism between two rival
versions of Emacs, and we also have saints; no gods, though.

To be a member of the Church of Emacs, you must recite the Confession
of the Faith: you must say, "There is no system but GNU, and Linux is
one of its kernels."

The Church of Emacs has advantages compared with other churches I
might name. To be a saint in the Church of Emacs does not require
celibacy. So if you're looking for a church in which to be holy, you
might consider ours.

However, it does require making a commitment to live a life of moral
purity. You must exorcise the evil proprietary operating systems that
possess all the computers under either your practical control or your
authority, and you must install a wholly [i.e., holy] free operating
system, where "wholly" can be spelled in more than one way, and then
only install free software on top of that. If you make this commitment
and live by it, then you, too, will be a saint and you, too, may
eventually have a halo -- if you can find one, because they don't make
them anymore.

Sometimes people ask me if, in the Church of Emacs, it is a sin to
use Vi. Well, it's true that VI-VI-VI is the editor of the Beast,
[laughter] but using a free version of Vi is not a sin, it's a
penance.

And sometimes people ask me if my halo is really an old computer
disk. [Points at halo] This is no computer disk, this is my halo. But it
was a computer disk in a previous existence.

So, thank you everyone.

[Applause]

22. About anonymity,
credit cards, cell phones

So I can answer questions for a while.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, do you know, or can you tell us why Linus
Torvalds, who has very very different attitudes with yours, released
Linux under your [unintelligible]? What motivated him?

RICHARD: I don't know why Linus Torvalds switched to the GNU
GPL for Linux. You'd have to ask him that. I don't recall ever seeing
the reason for that. I don't know.

AUDIENCE: Can you say something about the current effort to
put security in the network itself?

RICHARD: I don't know... he said, "efforts to plug security
into the network." I don't know what that means.

AUDIENCE: [unintelligible] remove anonymity from the network
itself.

RICHARD: Remove anonymity? Well, I don't know about those
efforts, but I think it's horrible. I don't do e-commerce because I
don't like to buy things with credit cards. I want to buy things
anonymously and I do so by paying cash in a store. I don't like giving
Big Brother any records about me. For the same reason, I do not have a
cell phone. I don't want to carry a personal tracking device. We have to
fight more to preserve our privacy from surveillance systems. So,
although I'm not familiar with the specific efforts you're talking
about, I find them dangerous, much more dangerous than computer
insecurity. Now, perhaps that's because I'm not a Windows user; so I
have less problem to deal with.

23. Free formats, copyright,
Microsoft

AUDIENCE: [unintelligible]

RICHARD: No, we can't. Basically he's asking if we can
monopolize file formats. Well, the answer is, we can't do so using our
copyright-based licenses, because copyright does not cover any idea,
principle, method of operation or system; it only covers the details of
expression of a work of authorship. So we can't, using our licenses like
the GNU GPL, prohibit anyone from writing his own code to handle the
same format.

We could conceivably get patents; however, it turns out patents are
very, very different from copyright; they have almost nothing in common,
and it turns out it costs a lot of money to get a patent and even more
money to keep the patent going. And the other thing is, {Microsoft
doesn't need to get} you shouldn't assume that what Microsoft is getting
a patent on is important because it's a big improvement. It just has to
be different. Microsoft can get a patent on something about a file
format that's different and then they can force most users to switch
over to a new format that uses that idea. And Microsoft can do this
because of its market power, its control.

We can't do that. The whole thing about the free software is, the
developers don't have any power; the users are in control. We can't
force users to switch over to anything, not even for their own
safety.

You know, we've been trying since around 1992 or so to convince users
to stop using GIF format, because that format is patented and some users
will get sued. So we said, "everybody please stop using GIF format for
the sake of those who get sued if the public uses this format." And
people haven't listened. So the thing is, we can't do what Microsoft
does, because that's based on using the power that they have, and since
we have chosen to respect people's freedom, we don't have power over the
public.

24. Dangers of webmail
loss of freedom

AUDIENCE: So, when somebody's using Google, they don't have
access to the source code that we use, so they have no way of
[unintelligible] what we do, so using that violates their freedom.

RICHARD: When a person is accessing the Google server, they
don't have either the binaries or the source code of the program that
Google is using, because it's Google that's using the program; that
person is not using the program. So I wouldn't expect to have the
authority to change the software that's running on your computer. You
should have the freedom to change the software that's running on your
computer, but I would never expect that I would have the freedom to go
into your computer and change the software there. Why should you let me
do that? So that's the way I see it when a person is using Google
server to do a search.

Now, there is a possible danger there. The danger doesn't come from
things like Google. The danger comes from things like Hotmail. When
people start using a server on the net to store their data and to do the
jobs that they really could be doing on their own computer, that
introduces a danger. I've never understood the people who said that thin
clients were the future, because I can't imagine why I would ever do
things that way. I've got a PC and it's capable of doing things like
running a mail reader; I'm going to have the mail on my own computer,
I'm not going to leave it on anybody's server. Especially not a server I
have no reason to trust. And these days, of course, if you allow your
personal data to be on somebody's server, you might as well be handing
it straight to Ashcroft and his gestapo.

RICHARD: He's asking, "if people were using a thin client and
all the computation were done on a remote server." Yes, it does mean
that people lose freedom, because, clearly, you can't change the
software that's set up on somebody else's server, so if you're using the
software on somebody else's server, instead of running it on your own
computer, you lose control. Now, I don't think that's a good thing, and
therefore I'm going to encourage people not to go along with it. People
will keep on developing the software to do these jobs on your own
machine.

{Leaving so soon? [Laughter] I hope it wasn't something I said. And
gee, now I won't get to meet her. Anyway.}

25. Copyright art vs. software

AUDIENCE: Are the Creative Commons a different denomination of
the same religion or a different religion?

RICHARD: {Creative Commons} Well, first of all, this isn't a
religion, except as a joke. The Church of Emacs is a joke. Please keep
in mind, taking any church too seriously can be hazardous to your
health, even the Church of Emacs. So this has nothing to do with
religion.

This is a matter of ethics. It's a matter of what makes for a good
society and what kind of society we want to live in. These are not
questions of dogma, these are questions of philosophy and politics.

The Creative Commons licenses are designed for artistic works, and I
think that they are good for artistic works. The issue for artistic
works is not exactly the same as for software.

Software is an example of a practical, functional work. You use it do
to a job. The main purpose of a program is not that people will read the
code and think, "boy, how fascinating, what a great job they did." The
main purpose of software is, you run it and it does something. And yes,
those people who are interested in software will also read it and learn,
but that's not the main purpose. It's interesting because of the job it
will do, not just because of how nice it is to read. Whereas with art,
the main use of art is the sensation that you get when you look at it or
listen to it. So these are very different ways of being used and, as a
result, the ethical issues about copying and modification are
different.

For practical, functional works, people have to be free with the four
freedoms, including free to publish a modified version. But for art I
wouldn't say that. I think that there's a certain minimum freedom that
we must always have for using any published work, and that is the
freedom to non-commercially distribute verbatim, exact copies. But I
wouldn't say that it has to go further than that necessarily. So I think
the Creative Commons licenses are a very useful and good thing to use
for art.

26. Malicious free software

AUDIENCE: Since everybody has the freedom to modify the code
and republish it, how do you keep out saboteurs?

RICHARD: Well, you don't. The point is, you can't ever. So you
just look at these different versions and you see which one you actually
like. You can't keep the saboteurs out of non-free software either; in
fact, the developer could be the saboteur. The developers often put in,
as I said, malicious features. And then you're completely helpless. At
least with free software, you can read the source code, you can compare
the two versions. If you're thinking of switching from this version to
that version, you can compare them and see what's different and look for
some malicious code.

27. Patented file formats

AUDIENCE: Do you happen to know which popular file formats are
secret and which ones are public?

RICHARD: Well, of the popular file formats, the only ones that
I know of that are secret are some Microsoft ones. But, on the other
hands, there are others that have patent problems. For instance, there's
still a patent covering LZW compression, which is used in GIF format.
And someone has a patent he claims covers JPEG format and is actually
suing a bunch of companies. And then there's a patent on MP3 audio, so
that the free software MP3 encoders have been driven underground in the
US. That's why people should switch to Ogg Vorbis format. And then, if
you look at, say, MPEG-2 video, there are 39 different US patents said
to cover aspects of MPEG-2. So there are a lot of such problems.

28. Games as free software

AUDIENCE: Is there any software that sort of mixes between the
Creative Commons and functional software, such as games or...?

RICHARD: Well, {you can say that a game} in many cases you can
look at a game as the combination of a program and a scenario. And then
it would make sense to treat the program like a program and the scenario
like a work of fiction. On the other hand, what you see is that it's
quite useful for the users to edit and republish modified versions of
these scenarios. So, although those are like fiction and art, not like
software, it really seems to be useful for users to be free to change
them.

29. GPL freedoms for cars,
saving seeds

AUDIENCE: Do you envision this free software philosophy to go
across, off the boundary to products, commodities...

RICHARD: When you say, "products, commodities," could you be
concrete?

AUDIENCE: [unintelligible] cars

RICHARD: So should the free software philosophy apply to cars?
Okay, well the free software philosophy is, you should be free to copy
and modify them. So, if you have a car copier, I think you should be
free to copy any car. But there are no car copiers, so that really is a
meaningless question. And then, second, modifying. Well, yeah, I think
if you've got a car, you should be free to modify it and, in fact, lots
of people do modify their cars. So, there may be some restrictions on
that, but to a large extent that freedom exists. So what you see is that
this isn't really a meaningful question when you're talking about
physical objects. There are, in general, no copiers for physical
objects.

If we imagine, someday in the future, that such copiers exist, well
that will be a different situation and yeah, that change would have
consequences for ethics and politics. If we had food copiers, I'm sure
that agribusiness would be trying to forbid people from having and using
food copiers. And that would be a tremendous political issue, just as
today there's a tremendous political issue about whether farmers ought
to be allowed to save seeds. Now, I believe that they have a fundamental
right to save seeds and that it's tyranny to stop them. A democratic
government would never do that.

30. No software is
better than non-free software

AUDIENCE: [roughly] Do you see a problem with free software
being under-produced because nobody wants to invest money
[unintelligible]?

RICHARD: I don't know what you mean by "under-produced." We
see that some people develop free software and some don't. So we could
imagine more people developing free software and, if so, we'd have more
of it. But, you see, the tragedy of the commons really is a matter of
overuse. And that's something that can happen maybe with a field, but it
doesn't happen with software; you can't overuse a program, you don't
wear it out. So, really, there's no analogy there.

AUDIENCE: Well, the example you gave is, let's say there's a
useful program and a thousand people want a change to it. You said they
could get their money together and go hire a programmer to make the
change. But each individual in that group can say, "well, I'll just let
the 999 pay for the change."

RICHARD: Well, they can do that, but that would be pretty
stupid, because if they saw that the result was, it wasn't getting done,
then if it's of some importance to them, then they're much better off
joining and contributing their money so that the change gets made. And
whether they do this or not, either way I won't agree that anything
tragic has happened. If they join and they pay for their change and they
get it, that's good, and if they don't join and they don't pay for that
change, that's good too; I guess they didn't want it enough. Either
one's okay.

Non-free software is evil and we're better off with nothing than with
non-free software. The tragedy of the commons can happen either through
overuse or under-contribution, but overuse is impossible in software.
Under-contribution happens when a program is proprietary. Then it's a
failure to contribute to the commons. And so I would like that
proprietary software to stop being developed. A non-free program is
worse than no program, because neither one allows you to get a job done
in freedom, but the non-free program might tempt people to give up their
freedom and that's really bad.

31. Portability of free
software

AUDIENCE: Is their a potential conflict between the free
software philosophy and the portability of [unintelligible]?

RICHARD: No, {I don't see} this makes no sense to me at all. I
see no conflict between the philosophy of free software and portability.
And in the free software world we've worked very hard to achieve
portability from all sides. We make our software very portable and we
make our software standardized so that other people can easily have
portability, so we are aiding portability from every possible direction.
Meanwhile, you see Microsoft deliberately introducing incompatibilities
and deliberately blocking interoperability. Microsoft can do that
because it has power. We can't do that. If we make a program
incompatible and the users don't like it, they can change it. They can
change it to be compatible. So we are not in a position where we could
impose incompatibility on anybody, because we have chosen not to try to
have power over other people.

32. Is some free
software obfuscated on purpose?

RICHARD: Well, I disagree with you. Please, this is silly. If
you're saying a program is hard to understand, that's not the same as
the people are restricting it. It's not the same as saying, "you're
forbidden to see it." Now, if you find it unclear, you can work on
making it clearer. The fact is, the developers probably are trying to
keep it clear, but it's a hard job and, unless you want to compare our
software with proprietary software and see which one is clearer, you
have no basis to make the claim that you're making. From what I hear,
non-free software is typically much worse and the reason is that the
developers figure no one will ever see it, so they'll never be
embarrassed by how bad it is.

33. Proprietary keeping an
edge

AUDIENCE: You hear the argument a lot from people who
manufacture devices or [unintelligible] hardware that they need to have
proprietary software in order to give them an edge, because, if they
gave away the software for free, then a competitor could manufacture the
device [unintelligible].

RICHARD: I don't believe this. I think it's all bullshit,
because there they are competing with each other and each one's saying,
"we need to make the software proprietary to have an edge over the
others." Well, if none of them did it, they might all lose their edge?
I mean, so what? We shouldn't buy this. And I mean, we shouldn't buy
what they're saying and we shouldn't buy their products either.

34. Forbidding is
forbidden how is this freedom?

AUDIENCE: I might be saying [unintelligible]

RICHARD: Please don't. The issue that you want to raise may be
a good issue, but please try to raise it in a neutral way, rather than
raising it with an attack.

AUDIENCE: There's something in my mind, so I'll just speak up.
The thing is, by actually registering [unintelligible] thing and saying
that "you can redistribute this software but you have to comply with
these four freedoms," is that not restricting my freedom too?

RICHARD: No, it's restricting you from having power. To stop A
from subjugating B is not a denial of freedom to A, because to subjugate
others is not freedom. That's power.

Now, there may be people who would like to exercise power and we're
stopping them, but that's good and that's not denying anyone
freedom.

I mean, you could just as well say if you're overthrowing a dictator,
the dictator's saying, "you're taking away my freedom to dictate to
everyone!" But that's not freedom, that's power.

So I'm making the distinction between freedom, which is having
control over your own life, and power, which is having control over
other people's lives. We've got to make this distinction; if we ignore
the difference between freedom and power, then we lose the ability to
judge whether a society is free or not. You know, if you lose this
distinction, then you look at Stalinist Russia and you say, "well, there
was just as much freedom there, it's just that Stalin had it all." No!
In Stalinist Russia, Stalin had power and people did not have freedom;
the freedom wasn't there, because it's only freedom when it's a matter
of controlling your own life. Controlling other people's lives is not
freedom at all, not for either of the people involved.

35. Can Google help free
software

AUDIENCE: In your opinion, is there anything that Google as a
company could do better in the spirit of free software?

RICHARD: I actually don't know enough about what Google is
doing to have any opinion. But if Google would like to donate some money
to the Free Software Foundation, we would gladly accept it. {I gather
that, I mean} I met some people here who are working on a particular
free program, namely Linux, the kernel. And I didn't ask actually if
they publish their improvements. [AUDIENCE: They do] Oh good, so
that's contributing. I mean, if you want to contribute to other pieces
of free software, that would be nice too, but I don't know if you have a
need to do that. And, of course, if you ever have a chance to release
some other generally useful new piece of free software, that would be
good too.

[RMS, 2010: Google now distributes some large nonfree programs. Some
are written in Javascript, and servers install them without your
noticing.]

36. Free software on
windows, good or bad

I'll take three more questions.

AUDIENCE: So, if I develop free software for a proprietary
system such as Windows, essentially I'm supporting the proprietary
system. Am I doing a good or a bad thing here?

RICHARD: Well, there's a good aspect and a bad aspect. In
regard to the use of your code, you're respecting other people's
freedom, so that's good, but the fact that it only runs on Windows is
bad. So, really, you shouldn't develop it on Windows. You shouldn't use
Windows. Using Windows is bad. {That is, in itself} It's not as bad as
being the developer of Windows, but it's still bad and you shouldn't do
that.

AUDIENCE: So you're saying, just don't do it at all.

RICHARD: Yeah, don't use Windows. Use GNU/Linux and develop
your free program for GNU/Linux instead. And then it will be good in
both ways.

AUDIENCE: But couldn't it open Windows users to this
ideology?

RICHARD: It could, but there's enough free software available
for use on Windows to have that effect. And the thing is, developing
software for Windows is going to create a practical incentive for people
to use Windows, rather than use GNU/Linux. So, please don't.

[RMS, 2010: to put it more clearly, making free programs run also on
Windows can be useful as he said; however, writing a free program only
for Windows is a waste.]

37. SCO's suit

AUDIENCE: What would be the impact of SCO winning their
argument against Linux? So what would be the impact on...

RICHARD: I don't know, it depends. It would have no effect on
the GPL. But {it might have some effect} some code might have to be
removed from Linux. And whether that would be a big problem or a tiny
problem depends on what code, so there's no way of saying. But I don't
think SCO is a real problem. I think software patents and treacherous
computing and hardware with secret specs, those are the real problems.
That's what we've got to be fighting against.

38. Stallman's problem typing

AUDIENCE: I have a non-ideology question. I'm personally very
interested in your battle with repetitive stress injuries and the impact
that it had on the development of GNU Hurd.

RICHARD: None, because I was never working on the GNU Hurd.
{I've never} We hired a person to write the GNU Hurd. I had nothing to
do with writing it. And there were a few years when I couldn't type much
and then we hired people to type for me. And then I found, by using
keyboards with a light touch, I could type again.

39. Open source, good or
bad Pat-riot Act.

AUDIENCE: Can you give us your opinion of open source?

RICHARD: Well, the open source movement is sort of like the
free software movement, except with the philosophical foundation
discarded. So they don't talk about right and wrong, or freedom, or
inalienable rights, they just don't present it in ethical terms. They
say that they have a development methodology that they say typically
results in technically superior software. So they only appeal to
practical, technical values.

And what they're saying may be right and if this convinces some
people to write free software, that's a useful contribution. But I think
they're missing the point when they don't talk about freedom, because
that's what makes our community weak, that we don't talk about and think
about freedom enough. People who don't think about freedom won't value
their freedom and they won't defend their freedom and they'll lose it.
Look at the USA Pat-riot Act. You know, people who don't value their
freedom will lose it.

40. The end

So thank you, and if anyone wants to buy any of these FSF things
or...